BlackBerry's for sale Wednesday, Aug. 5, at a mall in Riyadh.FAHAD SHADEED
The multinational dispute that has dampened Research In Motion's stock value increasingly appears to have less to do with foreign governments' publicly stated desire to monitor terrorists and more to do with keeping an eye on corporate information.
In the past week, the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have threatened to shut down certain BlackBerry services unless RIM agrees to provide local authorities with the means to monitor communication on the devices. Both nations have cited national security concerns as the primary reason for their demands. RIM has repeatedly said it simply cannot provide message data from corporate BlackBerrys because the information is encrypted and even the company cannot see it.
However, several engineers, analysts and security experts who spoke to The Globe and Mail said there is a significant difference between RIM's corporate product and its consumer BlackBerrys. While enterprise traffic is encrypted end-to-end, passing through RIM's own secure servers, consumer traffic is essentially reliant on local carriers, which in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are easily monitored by local authorities.
"[The consumer product]is very easy to crack," said Frost & Sullivan telecom analyst Ronald Gruia, "They could monitor 90 per cent of users - they're talking about the 10 per cent who use the enterprise product.
"Terrorists would use [non-enterprise BlackBerry services] Sure, they could have a few moles within enterprise, but in terms of probability, those guys are more likely users of [the non-enterprise product]"
Mr. Gruia said he has spoken to people within RIM who said they couldn't understand why Saudi Arabia, for example, threatened to shut off some BlackBerry services.
"Messages sent [via RIM's non-enterprise service]are dependent on the security of the local mobile operator," he said. "Non-corporate users of BlackBerrys are eminently monitorable."
It is also unclear why, if the UAE government is concerned about the potential for terrorists to use BlackBerrys unhindered in the country, it would announce a ban on the devices starting more than two months from now, on Oct. 11, and not immediately.
In its public statements this week, RIM has been very careful to specifically say that its enterprise product - the most important mobile tool for many of the world's biggest multinationals and the product on which RIM built its reputation - is secure, while making virtually no mention of the non-enterprise BlackBerrys that most average consumers buy. Indeed, while Ottawa and Washington have mentioned freedom of communication as one of the reasons for their intervention in the dispute between RIM and several foreign governments in the Middle East specifically, it is likely that the potential for corporate espionage was also a driving factor.
For its part, the UAE has said it is asking for nothing more than what RIM already provides to governments in countries such as the United States. RIM has disputed that assertion, saying it offers all governments the same service.
Although some security experts believe that Canada and the U.S. - and possibly China and Russia - have the capability to spy on RIM's wireless traffic, and that RIM may have developed additional agreements with those countries to make such spying easier, no government will discuss the topic. In an interview with The Globe this week, International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan said Canadian security arms will only go after data with a warrant or court order in a case where there is a particular concern, "not by broadly compromising security."
Analysts say there are some potential solutions to the standoff between RIM and the countries - such as software patches that make the devices easier to monitor, or more identifying information about individual devices. At the extreme end, RIM could build easily accessible network servers within the countries, or otherwise fundamentally change the way it handles messages. However, it is unclear whether one side would be willing to implement such solutions, and whether the other side would be satisfied with them.
Ironically, the governments' publicly stated goal of improving national security may well have taken a hit as a result of the public feud, which has made it more clear to everyone - including potential criminals - the vast difference between security on enterprise and non-enterprise BlackBerrys.
"In a way, this became almost self-defeating," Mr. Gruia said.